How To Make Your Phone Untappable

In 1991, Philip Zimmermann developed a humble-sounding electronic encryption technology known as Pretty Good Privacy. In fact, it was very good--so good that not even the federal government has been able to crack it, a fact that has made Zimmermann a folk hero to privacy advocates and a headache to law enforcement.

Now Zimmermann, the CEO of PGP Corp., has found himself back in the fiery debate between federal investigators and those who oppose their snooping--this time thanks to ZRTP, a technology for encrypting Internet telephone calls. ZRTP throws a wrench in the Bush administration's controversial warrant-free wiretapping program and its proposed legal immunity for the telecommunications companies. So far, not even teams of supercomputers and cyberspies at the National Security Agency have cracked ZRTP. That means anyone who uses Zimmermann's Zfone software, a ZRTP-enabled voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) program available for free on his Web site, can skirt the feds' wiretapping altogether.

Forbes.com spoke with Zimmermann about how his small company has been able to produce an encryption product that not even the U.S. government can break, what ZRTP means for national security, and why cutting off the government's access to our phones is necessary to keep out the truly malicious spies. (more)

Free advice.
Free software.
An end to wiretapping woes.
Come on. What more do you want from me?
The least you could do is send me some M&M's. :)
~Kevin

In-house NSA

A rapid way to spot insider threats from individuals within an organization such as a multinational company or military installation is reported in the current issue of the International Journal of Security and Networks. The technology uses data mining techniques to scour email and build up a picture of social network interactions. The technology could prevent serious security breaches, sabotage, and even terrorist activity.

Gilbert Peterson and colleagues at the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright Patterson AFB, in Ohio are developing technology that could help any organization sniff out insider threats by analyzing email activity or find individuals among potentially tens of thousands of employees with latent interests in sensitive topics. The same technology might also be used to spot individuals who feel alienated within the organization as well as unraveling any worrying changes in their social network interactions. (more)

...just in time to see the other one.

India successfully launched an Israeli spy satellite into orbit on Monday January 21, 2008. The launch of the TECSAR satellite by an Indian-made rocket was carried out in clear weather at 9:15 am local time (0345 GMT) from the Sriharikota space station in southern India. (more) (the other one)

DUCK!

A disabled American spy satellite is rapidly descending and is likely to plunge to Earth by late February or early March, posing a potential danger from its debris, officials said Saturday.

Officials said that they had no control over the nonfunctioning satellite and that it was unknown where the debris might land. (more)

Quote of the Day

"We're long past alligator clips on copper wires." - Roger Pilon, writing in The Wall Street Journal about a bipartisan surveillance authorization measure that's already passed the Intelligence Committee. (more)

U.S. military psychic spy manual

...from Neurophilosophy...
Remote viewing is a form of "psychoenergetic perception" (i.e. clairvoyance) developed as part of a long-term $20 million research program initiated by U.S. intelligence agencies in the early 1970s. Now known by the codename Stargate, the program was initiated largely in response to the belief that the Soviets were spending large amounts of money on psychic research.

Research into remote viewing began in 1972 at the Stanford Research Institute, "an independent non-profit research institute that conducts contract research and development for government agencies" (actually, a think tank that has nothing to do with Stanford university).

Led by Harold Puthoff, who had worked for the National Security Agency and was at the time a Scientologist, the research involved training people who were believed to be gifted psychics to use their alleged abilities for psychic warfare. Among these individuals were the New York artist Ingo Swann, who claimed to have remotely viewed the planet Mercury, and Uri Geller, the psychic spoon-bending fraudster. (more) (the manual)

AT&T Wiretap Whistleblower Fights Senate Deal

In 2002, Mark Klein, a former technician for AT&T, came forward with information that the company was collecting data for the National Security Agency. His testimony was central to several class-action lawsuits against AT&T for its alleged wiretapping.

Klein is now in Washington, D.C., to speak out against a possible Senate deal that would grant immunity to AT&T and the other telecoms for their role in NSA surveillance — effectively nullifying those lawsuits.

All Things Considered, November 7, 2007
Robert Siegel (in photo) talks with Klein. (audio)

Spooks Getting Spookier

Like previous rumors of psychic espionage programs operated by CIA, NSA, DIA, USAF, and the Navy, at a time when those programs were classified SECRET, word is getting out of a next generation effort. ...

"Spookytechnology" refers to real-world applications, under development right now, that utilize the weird aspects of quantum mechanics for next-generation 21st Century technologies. These include quantum computers, machines that in the words of Oxford's Dr. David Deutsch, compute using matter in other universes, to circuits built on quantum teleportation, with sights set on a next generation Internet using quantum encryption schemes that cannot be broken by ordinary physics.

Dr. Anthony Valentini has proposed using an explanation of the quantum known as pilot-wave theory. The pilot-wave appears as the guiding ghost-in-the-machine of Quantum Mechanics. Valentini has shown that the statistics of ordinary quantum mechanics might be violated by special non-quantum matter, which would have very strange properties indeed. The non-quantum matter could be used (presumably by someone like the NSA) to eavesdrop on theoretically unbreakable quantum secured communications.

Dr. Jack Sarfatti ... has gone even further than Valentini, by proposing that consciousness operates like Valentini's non-quantum matter, allowing for signals to be exchanged between different minds, "beyond space and time." ... Sarfatti suggests that this dance of the mind, body and spirit allows for the mind-to-mind communication reported by the psychic spy community. (more)

NYT editor to discuss eavesdropping

OR - The freedom of the media to publish government secrets is the subject of a free talk Wednesday at Willamette University.

Philip Taubman, associate editor and special correspondent for The New York Times, will discuss "Why We Publish Secrets" at 8 p.m. in Smith Auditorium at Willamette, 900 State St.

He will talk about the decision to publish the National Security Agency eavesdropping story, White House pressure on the paper not to publish, and the ongoing constitutional and legal issues concerning that decision.

Taubman became associate editor for The Times in March, covering national security. He had been the paper's Washington bureau chief since August 2003. (more)

If you go...
What: Philip Taubman lecture
When: 8 p.m. Wednesday
Where: Smith Auditorium, Willamette University, 900 State St., Salem, OR
Free Call: (503) 370-6058

Electronic Surveillance - "There’s money to be made..."

...And so a new industry was born, known in the trade as ‘Intelligence Support Systems’, complete with its own annual conference. If you’re in Dubai next February, drop by. Since there’s money to be made, panels cover such areas as ‘Electronic Surveillance Cost Recovery Solutions’ and – for the benefit of those who prefer to carry out the intercepts in-house before passing the data on ready-analysed to the relevant government agencies – the key topic of ‘how to transform packet intercept into intelligence’ (more)

Are bloggers part of the news media?

The U.S. government — led by two of its most secretive agencies — is increasingly saying, "Yes, they are."

Despite the rap that bloggers simply "bloviate" and "don't try to find things out," as conservative newspaper columnist Robert Novak once sniffed, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) have altered policies to indicate they're taking blogs seriously, and a growing number of public offices are actively reaching out to the blogosphere.

The CIA recently updated its policies on Freedom of Information Act requests to allow bloggers to qualify for special treatment once reserved for old-school reporters. And last August, the NSA issued a directive to its employees to report leaks of classified information to the media — "including blogs," the order said. (more)

The Science of Wiretapping (NPR)

On August 5, 2007, President Bush signed the Protect America Act of 2007 into law. The law, an amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA), extends the government's authority to wiretap without a warrant. In light of the new law, Science Friday (Ira Flatow) consulted wiretap experts Matt Blaze, a technologist and professor of computer and information science at University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia and Susan Landau, Distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems Laboratories about the science of wiretapping.
Matt Blaze explains old-style wiretapping
Susan Landau explains where NSA tapping might take place
(more)

Uncle Sam Wants You...r Hearing Aid

Audio Exploitation
Solicitation Number: Reference-Number-BAA-07-05-IFKA
Posted Date: Jul 11, 2007
Classification Code: A -- Research & Development

"The scope of this effort covers a broad range of audio and speech processing technologies not limited to: speaker identification, language/ dialect identification, obtaining the gist of a conversation by recognition of words and phrases, uncooperative speaker audio language translation, whispered speech detection, audio transmission segmentation in continuous speech, background noise identification, channel effect mitigation, usable speech determination, interference (noise and competing talkers) reduction, voice stress analysis, speaker verification, coding to preserve the characteristics of the talker and channel, watermarking, and correlation." (more)

Ron Rosenbaum - the man who jump-started my career with his Esquire article "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" - has an interesting observation...

"My fellow espionage obsessive Gil Roth sent me a link to the National Security Archive’s release on the CIA “Family Jewels” document dump which contained what has got to be the Greatest Euphemism ever coined...

What I found interesting and unremarked in the coverage of the memos was a remarkable passage in memo (#2 in the National Security Archive link) is that it’s very specific about many instances of illicit surveillance and telephone tapping, naming a handful of specific individuals as targets. And then there is one final paragraph that suddenly drops all pretense to transparency. Becomes astonishingly vague and opaque. Hence the potentially explosive euphemism.

According to this paragraph “the CIA occasionally tests experimental equipment on American telephone circuits. The CIA apparently has established guidelines for these tests which provide, among other things that no records may be kept, not tape and so forth.”

Tests experimental eavesdropping devices on American telephone equipment? And just how widespread are these tests” and how long to they go on. Do they test whether they can listen into to every conversation a given subject has. Wording like that would give them latitude. Wording like that seems designed to cover up more than it reveals.

There is a scandal here, I suspect, one that may turn out to have foreshadowed the NSA warrantless wireptapping scandal." (more)

How Would They Know? ...(*RIM*shot*)

Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry mobile e-mail device, Saturday dismissed France's warning against using the product due to potential spying concerns. ... RIM has denied speculation governments may be listening in on BlackBerry traffic. (written by Ed Sutherland - AHN News Writer)
(more)(more)(RIM's Security Statement)

RIM's response to the growing word-on-the-street about the imagined (or real) eavesdropping vulnerabilities of the BlackBerry was apparently not very strong, or convincing. We see words like "dismissed" and "denied" being used to describe RIM's security state-of-mind.

Too bad. RIM has taken great pains to assure the privacy of it's service. Read the Security Statement.

This is becoming a fiasco for RIM. The RIM techies need to drag the RIM PR folks around to the back of the plant and whack them in the head with some Triple DES, quickly.

RIM, fight back. Let the public know the technical facts ...and have answers ready for these news stories. Is France bashing because they are ready to launch their own system? Is the Wall Street bashing more about stopping crooked traders than it is about outside eavesdroppers?

All this being said, remember, "Only failed attempts at espionage are discovered." So, no matter what communications system you use... use it discretely. ~ Kevin

French Fear Blackberry's Will Be Squeezed...

...for their juicy information.

The French national-security office SGDN has warned the country's new cabinet members and presidential staff to stop using their BlackBerrys because confidential political and economic information could be intercepted by the Americans. ...

...its data transmissions processed by servers in the U.S. and U.K., France fears the U.S. National Security Agency could get its hands on any information sent through a BlackBerry...

...the French oil giant Total has never let its employees use one because of "security reasons." "There are plenty of other perfectly good PDAs," Total says. (more)(more)

Spy Agency Posts Windows, OS X Security Guides

Who should know more about security than the National Security Agency? (Hey, it's their middle name!) No one, presumably. Which is why you might want to check out a series of security configuration guides the NSA has posted for Windows XP, 2000, Mac OS X, and Sun Solaris. (more)

Top Secret Gov't Spying room revealed by AT&T Whistleblower [VIDEO]

ABC Nightline Special Report
In this clip, former AT&T technician Mark Klein discusses his investigation of a secret room built in conjunction with the National Security Agency through which all customer information was routed.

The Los Angeles TImes killed the story. The New York TImes gave it life. Both the EFF and the ACLU have cases in the courts at the moment. As the clip shows, the government (and AT&T) are trying to get the case dismissed on "national security" grounds. (video)

(update - 11/7/07)
A former technician at AT&T, who alleges that the telecom forwards virtually all of its internet traffic into a "secret room" to facilitate government spying, says the whole operation reminds him of something out of Orwell's 1984.

Appearing on MSNBC's Countdown program, whistleblower Mark Klein told Keith Olbermann that a copy of all internet traffic passing over AT&T lines was copied into a locked room at the company's San Francisco office -- to which only employees with National Security Agency clearance had access -- via a cable splitting device.

"My job was to connect circuits into the splitter device which was hard-wired to the secret room," said Klein. "And effectively, the splitter copied the entire data stream of those internet cables into the secret room -- and we're talking about phone conversations, email web browsing, everything that goes across the internet." (video)